Pieter

“You used to be able to push open the little door inside the church and find yourself in a delightful piece of waste ground, covered with vegetation, where your feet might stumble against some of the oldest stones in Paris. Hard by the chevet of St Julian one of the last vestiges of 'Philippe Auguste's Wall' stuck up abruptly out of the long grass like a rock emerging from the sea, and a twisted tree, slowly dying beneath the weight of several centuries, still sprouted leaves that quivered overhead. Who remembers that place, so attuned to day-dreaming? In the distance the towers of Notre-Dame, white in stormy weather, looked black against the July sky, and the occasional tugboat on the Seine would utter a long-drawn-out, melancholy cry, the misty note lingering, and fading into the blue beyond. Yet the hubbub of Paris seemed to die at the edges of that small solitude where I loved to come and think. The silence around me was like a dwelling in which the past had sought refuge.”
― Julien Green, Paris

“My first ten years were spent in a suburb of Melbourne so quiet that I believed no people could have survived on the far side of their trimmed privet hedges unless their wardrobes and cupboards were stuffed with rubber or clay or painted tokens of another world altogether, a world that poked up into Melbourne in the dark corners of bedrooms and the shadowy spaces under fruit-trees and behind fowl sheds in backyards wholly hidden from the street. On many a Sunday afternoon when my mother took me on long trips by tram to visit some aunt or great-aunt and I had to sit for the first half-hour in the front room, I looked around me for some detail of a painted landscape on the wall or some gesture made by a porcelain figure in the crystal-cabinet or some pattern in the threads of an anti-macassar that seemed the nearest sign of the other world. Then, when I was allowed to go outside , I would always find a certain kind of place - the patch of rotting leaves under the treefern on the blind side of the house; the clump of arum lilies between the garden shed and the back fence; the corner of lawn just beyond the last flagstone in a path that had seemed likely to lead to something much more definite. I would stand in that place and stare, and wonder what word I had to learn the meaning of or what other person I had to turn myself into before I could recognise the doorway that must have been somewhere just in front of me.”
― Gerald Murnane, Landscape with Landscape

“Describe a cat for me,’ Morgo said. ‘Let it take shape in your mind. All your recollections and associations with cats.’
Thors Provoni thought about cats. It seemed a harmless thing to do as they waited out the six days until they reached Earth.
‘Opinionated’ Morgo said at last.
‘Me, you mean? On the subject?’
‘No, I mean cats. And self-centred.’
Angrily, Provoni said, ‘A cat is loyal to its master. But shows it in a subtle way. That’s the whole point, a cat gives himself to no one, and this has been his way for millions of years, and then you manage to knock a chink in his armor, and he rubs against you and sits on your lap and purrs. So, because of his love for you, he breaks the inherent genetic behavior-pattern of two million years. What a victory that is.’
‘Assuming the cat is sincere,’ Morgo said, ‘Rather than trying to cadge extra food.’
‘You think a cat can be a hypocrite?’ Provoni asked. ‘I’ve never heard an insinuation of insincerity directed towards cats. Actually, much of the critisism comes from their brutal honesty; if they don’t like a person then shit, they’re of to someone else.’
‘I think,’ Morgo said, ‘When we get to Terra I would like to have a dog.”
― Philip K. Dick, Our Friends From Frolix 8

“In my father's house there were many mansions and they were all the same, labyrinthian interiors smelling of damp plaster and varnish, the dark hallways narrow, hung with sepia prints of places no one ever visited or would ever dream of visiting - Hong Kong, Abu Simbel, Nasirabad - a seemingly endless bolt of oriental carpet streaming down the stairs and flooding the rooms, its disconcerting flotsam bobbing up in isolated squares of sunlight, all those grimacing flowers, horned faces, toothless mouths flung to the nethermost nook and cranny, lapping here against a broom closet door, pooling there around an umbrella stand, puddling at last beneath a snarl of hair and dust.”
― Kathryn Davis, Hell